The Duran

Grandson of oil tycoon J. Paul Getty found dead at his Hollywood Hills home

Grandson of oil tycoon J. Paul Getty found dead at his Hollywood Hills home

Yesterday afternoon Andrew Rork Getty, the 47-year-old grandson of oil tycoon J. Paul Getty who once was the richest living man in the world and member of the Getty trust, was found dead at his Hollywood Hills home.

In a story which we initially thought was an early April fool’s prank, but subsequently turned out to be all too real, and all too tragic, yesterday afternoon Andrew Rork Getty, the 47-year-old grandson of oil tycoon J. Paul Getty who once was the richest living man in the world and member of the Getty trust, was found dead at his Hollywood Hills home, the latest chapter in a saga involving the Getty family which has seen kidnappings (including a tax-deductible ransom payment), mutilations, drug use and now, allegedly, murder.

How the billionaire heir of the Getty trust and son of Ann Getty and Gordon Getty (whom Forbes lists as the 869th richest person in the world and estimates that the Getty family is currently $5 billion) died is still murky.

According to NBC, a call came in from an unidentified woman at 2:18 p.m. who reported there was someone dead in the bathroom. A woman who was in the home was being questioned and was being cooperative, said Cmdr. Andy Smith, a Los Angeles police spokesman.

When asked about the cause of death, Los Angeles County Coroner’s Assistant Chief Ed Winter told reporters that Getty’s death appeared to be “natural or an accident.” Cmdr. Andy Smith, a Los Angeles police spokesman added that ” At first glance, it does not appear to be a criminal type of act. But that could change.”

And here things get tabloidy, if not inaccurate: according to Gawker, Getty’s ex-girlfriend, who called 911, apparently told the operator he had suffered a cardiac arrest, and TMZ’s initial report contained a now-excised reference to a gunshot wound to the face. In an updated post, TMZ reports Getty’s death involved a “traumatic injury to the rectal area” with “significant bleeding.”

Additionally, the LA Times reports that Getty had sought a restraining order against the woman as recently as two weeks ago. TMZ provides further unverified details:

Our sources say Andrew and his ex-girlfriend have a storied history with the LAPD. Cops have been to his residence 31 times, mostly for domestic disturbances. Our sources say they have both frequently been under the influence of drugs during the police visits.

We’re told the drugs cops found in the past were prescriptions.

As for their relationship, we’re told he has a restraining order against her and she has been placed under a 5150 psychiatric hold in the past, after injuring cops when they responded to the house. We’re also told she’s allegedly broken into Andrew’s house on numerous occasions.

A subsequent report by the LA Times gave the TMZ report credibility when it reported that “a law enforcement source told The Times that Getty was found naked from the waist down in the bathroom of his Hollywood Hills estate Tuesday and appeared to have suffered from some type of blunt-force trauma. It’s unclear whether the injury was caused by a fall or something else.”

So to summarize the initial patchwork of facts and evidence, the heir to the man who was once the world’s richest died from what appear to be “natural causes”, and it wasn’t a “criminal act”, but it did involves “blunt force trauma”, most likely to the rectal area.

In retrospect it is not surprising that “the family has requested that members of the media and the public respect its privacy during this extremely difficult time,” a spokesman told the LA Times.

What is most surprising is that this latest incident to plague the J. Paul Getty descendants may not be the most lurid.

As Forbes recalls, “in 1973, another grandson of J. Paul was kidnapped by Italian gangsters who asked for $17 million in ransom and threatened to send a severed finger as proof. “I have 14 other grandchildren,” Getty told his son, who was pleading for the money, “if I pay one penny now, then I’ll have 14 kidnapped grandchildren.” As the negotiations dragged on, an Italian media organization received a lock of hair and J. Paul III’s ear in the mail. Getty eventually coughed up $3.4 million to buy his grandson’s freedom. Years later, J. Paul III suffered a stroke after heavy drug use in New York which left him paralyzed and practically blind for the rest of his life. Andrew Getty’s father, Gordon, also made headlines for all the wrong reasons when it was revealed that the opera enthusiast and San Francisco socialite had kept a second family secret for a decade.”

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Trump grounds Nancy Pelosi from taxpayer-subsidized travel

Nancy Pelosi is 78 years old. She is the Democrat Party leader of the House of Representatives, and presently she is Speaker of the House since her party holds the majority of seats there. She is also grounded, like a naughty teenager.

Like a naughty, gossipy teenager, she is bitterly embroiled in a popularity war against another septuagenarian, US President Donald Trump (age 72).

One has to admit that there is a great deal of humor that can be extracted from this. After all, we are taught as kid to “behave like adults.” No doubt The Donald and Mrs. Pelosi were taught this too, probably even more strongly than those of us who are younger.

However, the American media is eager mostly to brand this as a “temper tantrum” of the President, because most of the American media, for some reason, just doesn’t like Mr. Trump. We have noted before here on The Duran the thought experiment surrounding Mr. Trump: “what if he had run as a Democrat, but with the exact same policy set as he has now?”

It is really too bad that it is not possible to see what would happen, but a thinking person can use this thought experiment to discover that most of the sentiment against Mr. Trump is simply because he ran as a Republican.

In the middle of the night, the State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service provided an updated threat assessment detailing that the President announcing this sensitive travel had significantly increased the danger to the delegation and to the troops, security, and other officials supporting the trip,” Pelosi spokesman Drew Hammill said. “This morning, we learned that the administration had leaked the commercial travel plans as well.”

Which, to borrow the parlance of the Internet, is VERY big, if true.

It’s one thing for Trump, as he did on Thursday, to rescind the military plane Pelosi and the rest of her colleagues were planning to fly on as a way of exacting revenge on her for asking the President to delay his planned “State of the Union” speech on January 29. To do so publicly — White House press secretary Sarah Sanders tweeted out the letter Trump sent to Pelosi — is to raise the stakes. To leak commercial travel plans to make absolutely certain that Pelosi can’t go on the trip is a bridge even further.

Now, to be clear, this is an allegation made by Pelosi without corroboration to date. And, the White House denies it. “When the Speaker of the House and about 20 others from Capitol Hill decide to book their own commercial flights to Afghanistan, the world is going to find out,” a White House official told CNN’s Sarah Westwood and Kevin Liptak. “The idea we would leak anything that would put the safety and security of any American at risk is a flat out lie.”

It appears that Mrs Pelosi is copying The New York Times and The Washington Post narrative style of “slander the President, acknowledge somewhere buried in the article that the slanderous charge is unsubstantiated, but get that slander out there so people hear it and read it!”

It is a shoddy attempt for the news media to manipulate its consumers all while “protecting itself” from libel.

The unfortunate fact is that it does work, at least insofar as to galvanize the anti-Trump crowd into a very solid bloc of insanely angry Americans. Further, in using the classic style in which a drug addict or active alcoholic manipulates people to pity him or her, Mrs. Pelosi and the media act like the druggie teenagers arrayed as one against Dear old Dad, who is the only adult in the house.

The White House. But, still.

To put a bit of adult analysis on this story is very simple, but it is honestly not very thrilling. To be honest, it is probably more fun to be like the mainstream media and the Democrats – energized by passion, doing stupid things publicly and getting attention and praise for it.

But here is what appears to be the hard cold boring reality behind this saga.

President Trump is committed to getting a change made in how the United States handles illegal immigration. For decades, the country has been getting slowly infiltrated, if not invaded, by immigrants who at the very least game the welfare and social support mechanisms of various levels of US federal, state and local governments. When people come into the country illegally and go on welfare, taxpayers start paying non-citizens for being here. Taking care of even 100,000 illegal immigrants with such programs is likely to be extremely expensive. Housing, food, healthcare, schooling, legal protection by police… it goes on and on.

But there are not just 100,000 such people here. Last year, the Border Patrol apprehended well over four times that number. 467,000 illegals were apprehended in 2018. Estimates show anywhere from 12 million to 22 million illegals presently living in the United States. While it is certainly doubtful that all of them are gaming the welfare system, they are in the country, unknown, untracked, and not being good citizens by paying taxes and supporting our agreed-upon infrastructure and services the same way that American citizens are.

That is a huge money drain.

Add to that the drugs that do flow across the Mexican border, a fair infusion of criminals like murderers and rapists, and the possibility of terrorists making use of the open border to infiltrate the US and the situation becomes both costly and dangerous.

This is why President Trump wants to change it with a barrier running the length of the US-Mexico border.

While it is unlikely that all 2,000 miles need to have a wall, we certainly need more of a barrier than what we have now, and the barriers that DO exist are extremely successful in cutting the flow of illegals. From the high point of 2000, immigration apprehensions have on the whole fallen by quite a bit. This chart shows the track through 2016.

But our 467,000 apprehensions is an enormous number – larger than the population of the city of Long Beach, California!

This is an enormous number, but it is far lower than the 1.6 million that got caught before the existing barriers were built. This is also the number of illegals that were caught. We do not know how many were not caught.

Now, President Trump begins to look like the adult in the room, because he wants to fix this, bringing the numbers down much closer to zero, and also finding a way to vet and interview immigrants that truly can contribute to the US dream as Americans. So, as part of creating a real border security apparatus, he wants to extend and even complete the Border Wall. It is not very expensive – even a $50 billion price tag is only about 1.3% of the bloated federal budget this year, and President Trump thinks the wall can be finished with half that amount. At this time, he is only asking for about $5 bn.

And all Nancy Pelosi will say is “no!” So, like a good parent, the President refuses to reward such behavior by giving her what she wants. Now there is a partial government shutdown. President Trump took it on himself, but he is correct. He is doing this because the Democrats are doing this childish druggie routine. And he cannot reward this behavior.

Pelosi and her loyal sidekick Senator Charles Schumer are like a clique of druggie kids in the class, disrupting everything by commanding some attention. But it seems they are gradually losing it, and the government remains shut down. However, they wanted to act like it is Trump’s fault, so Nancy Pelosi was trying to do “business as usual” and go to Afghanistan for whatever reason (do they want her?).

And the President said, “hey, not so fast. You have a partially closed government, and I have been here every day waiting for you to negotiate a deal. You have to be nuts to think this shutdown is not going to affect you, so you cannot use our military transportation while the government is shut down. It is only fair.”

Now who is looking like the bratty teenager?

For some people who read articles like this, the answer will probably still be “President Trump.”

But maybe if they put down the cannabis and the booze and read facts for a change, their heads will clear up and they will come to see what the rest of properly thinking people have already seen.

In this feud, there is an adult in the room. And he is having to manage the childish behavior of a woman six years older than he is.

The Pences: defenders of Christian values in the White House

A companion article noted that Christian believers in the US are seeking to help stand for those Christians in far off lands who are being martyred and persecuted for their faith at the hands of ISIS and other cruel religious and secular forces. But we also noted that this problem is extremely fierce in the Western “Christian” world, but the attacks try to bring Christian life to irrelevance and “shame it out of existence.”

An example of this in action came from Yahoo.com, carrying a news piece from AFP. Here is that piece; we have added emphases to focus on our point:

On page 11 of an application to work at a private Christian school in Virginia, teachers are bluntly asked to pledge to “maintain a lifestyle based on biblical standards of moral conduct.” It goes on to say banned conduct includes, but is not limited, to: “heterosexual activity outside of marriage (e.g. premarital sex, cohabitation, extramarital sex), homosexual or lesbian sexual activity, polygamy, transgender identity” or “any other violation of the unique roles of male and female.”

Students at the Immanuel Christian School — who range in age from five to 14 — are also banned from engaging in “homosexual or bi-sexual activity,” according to an agreement parents must sign before enrollment. Vice President Mike Pence’s wife Karen is once again teaching art at the school in Washington’s suburbs — sparking anger from gay rights advocates who say it sends the wrong message from the inner circles of US power. “We’ll let the critics roll off our backs,” Pence said in an interview with Catholic television network EWTN. But he added: “The criticism of Christian education in America should stop.”

Of course, the Pence family’s brand of religious conservatism is exactly why Donald Trump chose him as a running mate in July 2016.

– Pro-prayer, anti-abortion –

At that time, Pence was the governor of Indiana and a former congressman with a low national profile. He had a few crowning achievements to boast of — a state anti-abortion law and a “religious freedom law” that said individuals and companies wishing not to serve gay and lesbian customers could cite a “substantial burden” on their religious beliefs as a reason.

An amendment was eventually passed to provide protections for LGBT citizens.

The anti-abortion law added limits to access, banning those motivated by the fetus’s race, gender or disability. But it was eventually blocked in the courts. Nevertheless, the two initiatives had burnished Pence’s reputation as a champion of the religious right. Since taking office as vice president, the 59-year-old Pence — who seems to make it his business not to make waves — regularly appears alongside the 45th president of the United States.

In meetings, he often takes a back seat, his lips sealed and his head nodding in approval. When he speaks in public, he never misses a chance to voice his admiration for the man who brought him back to Washington.

On the face of it, they could not be more different — Trump is brash, twice divorced, vocal about his sexual conquests and doesn’t seem to have a tight grasp on biblical passages. Pence meanwhile said last year: “I do try and start every day reading the Bible. My wife and I try to have a prayer together before I leave the house every morning.” On Thursday, the vice president was set to host a roundtable for pro-abortion rights activists on the eve of the March for Life, a major annual anti-abortion rally in Washington. Pence was the first vice president to speak at the march in 2017.

“We will not rest, until we restore a culture of life in America for ourselves and our posterity,” Pence told the crowd.

– The fight continues –

Mike and Karen Pence met at church — an evangelical Protestant congregation. One in four Americans associates with the movement. Today, they are often seen holding hands when they are together in public. Pence often begins his tweets by saying, “Karen and I are praying for…”

They are reportedly inseparable — a fact that sometimes sparks mockery. In 2002, Mike Pence, then a lawmaker, infamously told The Hill that he never ate alone with a woman other than Karen, and that he would not accept an invitation to an event where alcohol was being served if she were not there. “If there’s alcohol being served and people are being loose, I want to have the best-looking brunette in the room standing next to me,” Pence told the Washington paper.

While he has often joked about his traditional views of coupledom, he has never denied them. Karen Pence, 62, shares her husband’s conservative beliefs. In 1991, she wrote to The Indianapolis Star newspaper to complain about an article that, she claimed, encouraged children to think they were gay or lesbian, according to a copy of the letter released by The Washington Post. Since that time, gay marriage has become the law of the land — legal across the country. But there is no explicit federal ban on discriminating against someone for their sexual orientation, which allows employers like the Immanual Christian School to maintain its rules against “sexual immorality.”

For the Pences, as for other evangelicals, the battle continues.

The thing that is stunning about this news piece is that it casts what are traditionally Christian values and a traditionally good Christian family in a negative light. For AFP and Yahoo, the Pences are an anomaly, a throwback that needs to be thrown back. The contemporary reader is more likely to mock the “backwardness” of Family Pence rather than see their lifestyles as honorable.

In sworn testimony, Google CEO Sundar Pichai told Congress last month that his company does not “manually intervene” on any particular search result. Yet an internal discussion thread leaked to Breitbart News reveals Google regularly intervenes in search results on its YouTube video platform – including a recent intervention that pushed pro-life videos out of the top ten search results for “abortion.”

The term “abortion” was added to a “blacklist” file for “controversial YouTube queries,” which contains a list of search terms that the company considers sensitive. According to the leak, these include some of these search terms related to: abortion, abortions, the Irish abortion referendum, Democratic Congresswoman Maxine Waters, and anti-gun activist David Hogg.

The existence of the blacklist was revealed in an internal Google discussion thread leaked to Breitbart News by a source inside the company who wishes to remain anonymous. A partial list of blacklisted terms was also leaked to Breitbart by another Google source.

In the leaked discussion thread, a Google site reliability engineer hinted at the existence of more search blacklists, according to the source.

“We have tons of white- and blacklists that humans manually curate,” said the employee. “Hopefully this isn’t surprising or particularly controversial.”

Others were more concerned about the presence of the blacklist. According to the source, the software engineer who started the discussion called the manipulation of search results related to abortion a “smoking gun.”

The software engineer noted that the change had occurred following an inquiry from a left-wing Slate journalist about the prominence of pro-life videos on YouTube, and that pro-life videos were replaced with pro-abortion videos in the top ten results for the search terms following Google’s manual intervention.

“The Slate writer said she had complained last Friday and then saw different search results before YouTube responded to her on Monday,” wrote the employee. “And lo and behold, the [changelog] was submitted on Friday, December 14 at 3:17 PM.”

The manually downranked items included several videos from Dr. Antony Levatino, a former abortion doctor who is now a pro-life activist. Another video in the top ten featured a woman’s personal story of being pressured to have an abortion, while another featured pro-life conservative Ben Shapiro. The Slate journalist who complained to Google reported that these videos previously featured in the top ten, describing them in her story as “dangerous misinformation.”

Since the Slate journalist’s inquiry and Google’s subsequent intervention, the top search results now feature pro-abortion content from left-wing sources like BuzzFeed, Vice, CNN, and Last Week Tonight With John Oliver. In her report, the Slate journalist acknowledged that the search results changed shortly after she contacted Google.

The manual adjustment of search results by a Google-owned platform contradicts a key claim made under oath by Google CEO Sundar Pichai in his congressional testimony earlier this month: that his company does not “manually intervene on any search result.”

A Google employee in the discussion thread drew attention to Pichai’s claim, noting that it “seems like we are pretty eager to cater our search results to the social and political agenda of left-wing journalists.”

One of the posts in the discussion also noted that the blacklist had previously been edited to include the search term “Maxine Waters” after a single Google employee complained the top YouTube search result for Maxine Waters was “very low quality.”

Google’s alleged intervention on behalf of a Democratic congresswoman would be further evidence of the tech giant using its resources to prop up the left. Breitbart News previously reported on leaked emails revealing the company targeted pro-Democrat demographics in its get-out-the-vote efforts in 2016.

According to the source, a software engineer in the thread also noted that “a bunch of terms related to the abortion referendum in Ireland” had been added to the blacklist – another change with potentially dramatic consequences on the national policies of a western democracy.

youtube_controversial_query_blacklist

At least one post in the discussion thread revealed the existence of a file called “youtube_controversial_query_blacklist,” which contains a list of YouTube search terms that Google manually curates. In addition to the terms “abortion,” “abortions,” “Maxine Waters,” and search terms related to the Irish abortion referendum, a Google software engineer noted that the blacklist includes search terms related to terrorist attacks. (the posts specifically mentions that the “Strasbourg terrorist attack” as being on the list).

“If you look at the other entries recently added to the youtube_controversial_query_blacklist(e.g., entries related to the Strasbourg terrorist attack), the addition of abortion seems…out-of-place,” wrote the software engineer, according to the source.

After learning of the existence of the blacklist, Breitbart News obtained a partial screenshot of the full blacklist file from a source within Google. It reveals that the blacklist includes search terms related to both mass shootings and the progressive anti-second amendment activist David Hogg.

Responding to a request for comment, a YouTube spokeswoman said the company wants to promote “authoritative” sources in its search results, but maintained that YouTube is a “platform for free speech” that “allow[s]” both pro-life and pro-abortion content.

YouTube’s full comment:

YouTube is a platform for free speech where anyone can choose to post videos, as long as they follow our Community Guidelines, which prohibit things like inciting violence and pornography. We apply these policies impartially and we allow both pro-life and pro-choice opinions. Over the last year we’ve described how we are working to better surface news sourcesacross our site for news-related searches and topical information. We’ve improved our search and discovery algorithms, built new features that clearly label and prominently surface news sources on our homepage and search pages, and introduced information panels to help give users more authoritative sources where they can fact check information for themselves.

In the case of the “abortion” search results, YouTube’s intervention to insert “authoritative” content resulted in the downranking of pro-life videos and the elevation of pro-abortion ones.

A Google spokesperson took a tougher line than its YouTube subsidiary, stating that “Google has never manipulated or modified the search results or content in any of its products to promote a particular political ideology.”

However, in the leaked discussion thread, a member of Google’s “trust & safety” team, Daniel Aaronson, admitted that the company maintains “huge teams” that work to adjust search results for subjects that are “prone to hyperbolic content, misleading information, and offensive content” – all subjective terms that are frequently used to suppress right-leaning sources.

He also admitted that the interventions weren’t confined to YouTube – they included search results delivered via Google Assistant, Google Home, and in rare cases Google ’s organic search results.

In the thread, Aaronson attempted to explain how search blacklisting worked. He claimed that highly specific searches would generate non-blacklisted results, even controversial ones. But the inclusion of highly specific terms in the YouTube blacklist, like “David Hogg cant remember his lines” – the name of an actual viral video – seems to contradict this.

Aaronson’s full post is copied below:

I work in Trust and Safety and while I have no particular input as to exactly what’s happening for YT I can try to explain why you’d have this kind of list and why people are finding lists like these on Code Search.

When dealing with abuse/controversial content on various mediums you have several levers to deal with problems. Two prominent levers are “Proactive” and “Reactive”:

Proactive: Usually refers to some type of algorithm/scalable solution to a general problem

E.g.: We don’t allow straight up porn on YouTube so we create a classifier that detects porn and automatically remove or flag for review the videos the porn classifier is most certain of

Reactive: Usually refers to a manual fix to something that has been brought to our attention that our proactive solutions don’t/didn’t work on and something that is clearly in the realm of bad enough to warrant a quick targeted solution (determined by pages and pages of policies worked on over many years and many teams to be fair and cover necessary scope)

E,g.: A website that used to be a good blog had it’s domain expire and was purchased/repurposed to spam Search results with autogenerated pages full of gibberish text, scraped images, and links to boost traffic to other spammy sites. It is manually actioned for violating policy

Manually reacting to things is not very scalable, and is not an ideal solution to most problems, so the proactive lever is really the one we all like to lean on. Ideally, our classifiers/algorithm are good at providing useful and rich results to our users while ignoring things at are not useful or not relevant. But we all know, this isn’t exactly the case all the time (especially on YouTube).

From a user perspective, there are subjects that are prone to hyperbolic content, misleading information, and offensive content. Now, these words are highly subjective and no one denies that. But we can all agree generally, lines exist in many cultures about what is clearly okay vs. what is not okay. E.g. a video of a puppy playing with a toy is probably okay in almost every culture or context, even if it’s not relevant to the query. But a video of someone committing suicide and begging others to follow in his/her footsteps is probably on the other side of the line for many folks.

While my second example is technically relevant to the generic query of “suicide”, that doesn’t mean that this is a very useful or good video to promote on the top of results for that query. So imagine a classifier that says, for any queries on a particular text file, let’s pull videos using signals that we historically understand to be strong indicators of quality (I won’t go into specifics here, but those signals do exist). We’re not manually curating these results, we’re just saying “hey, be extra careful with results for this query because many times really bad stuff can appear and lead to a bad experience for most users”. Ideally the proactive lever did this for us, but in extreme cases where we need to act quickly on something that is so obviously not okay, the reactive/manual approach is sometimes necessary. And also keep in mind, that this is different for every product. The bar for changing classifiers or manual actions on span in organic search is extremely high. However, the bar for things we let our Google Assistant say out loud might be a lot lower. If I search for “Jews run the banks” – I’ll likely find anti-semitic stuff in organic search. As a Jew, I might find some of these results offensive, but they are there for people to research and view, and I understand that this is not a reflection of Google feels about this issue. But if I ask Google assistant “Why do Jews run the banks” we wouldn’t be similarly accepting if it repeated and promoted conspiracy theories that likely pop up in organic search in her smoothing voice.

Whether we agree or not, user perception of our responses, results, and answers of different products and mediums can change. And I think many people are used to the fact that organic search is a place where content should be accessible no matter how offensive it might be, however, the expectation is very different on a Google Home, a Knowledge Panel, or even YouTube.

These lines are very difficult and can be very blurry, we are all well aware of this. So we’ve got huge teams that stay cognizant of these facts when we’re crafting policies considering classifier changes, or reacting with manual actions – these decisions are not made in a vacuum, but admittedly are also not made in a highly public forum like TGIF or IndustryInfo (as you can imagine, decisions/agreement would be hard to get in such a wide list – image if all your CL’s were reviewed by every engineer across Google all the time). I hope that answers some questions and gives a better layer of transparency without going into details about our “Pepsi formula”.

Best,

Daniel

The fact that Google manually curates politically contentious search results fits in with a wider pattern of political activity on the part of the tech giant.

Yet another showed Google engaged in targeted turnout operations aimed to boost voter participation in pro-Democrat demographics in “key states” ahead of the 2016 election. The effort was dubbed a “silent donation” by a top Google employee.

Evidence for Google’s partisan activities is now overwhelming. President Trump has previously warned Google, as well as other Silicon Valley giants, not to engage in censorship or partisan activities. Google continues to defy him.